With the Internet’s vast coffers of data growing day by day, there are some that are looking to play catch up by means of cataloging each and every bit of it. Those people? The military.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently awarded a $29.7 million contract meant for developing a universal text engine that would be capable of grabbing tons of knowledge from written matter, and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems and humans could work with.

“The machine reading system that DARPA envisions is not evolutionary, but revolutionary,” said BBN Technologies VP Prem Natarajan. “Such a system could eliminate many of the impediments to stability that our military faces such as a lack of understanding of local customs, and give us the ability to assess global technology developments continuously.”

Image Credit: DARPA